Milano Film Festival - 13th edition
12 - 21 September 2008
Piccolo Teatro, Teatro Dal Verme, and Parco Sempione


International Feature and Short Film Competitions

A thorough activity to search for, discover, and promote new talents. Contacts with production houses, film schools, and festivals from all over the world. A Call for Entries that has attracted for 13 years the best young independent filmmakers worldwide. We have watched over 3,200 short and feature films (1,000 more than last year) submitted to the two International Competitions of Milano Film Festival's 13th edition, that will run in Milan from September 12-21. The Selection Committee is now ready to announce the final selection: 10 feature films and 48 short films in competition, featuring surprising discoveries, as well as works by filmmakers already selected in the past.

Among the feature films, seven debut works, two documentaries, and ten Italian premières, from nine countries. Young filmmakers (the "oldest" is 41), among which some are well-known by the Milano Film Festival audience, while others have successfully taken part in international film festivals and come now to Italy for the first time: ten feature films providing an overview of young, high-quality, independent filmmaking. The 2008 Feature Film Award will be conferred by a jury including a wide range of important figures in Italian culture: the writer and author Filippo Timi, the lady writer Silvia Ballestra, the film editor Carlotta Cristiani, the filmmaker Alessandro Piva, and Manuel Agnelli, the frontman of the Italian band Afterhours.

Ten young authors, among which Anna Melikian, the Azerbaijan-born Russian filmmaker whose feature film Mermaid is a urban fable telling the story of the mermaid Alisa, set in a suspended world, on the border between unrestrained imagination and urban realism. Just like the two documentaries from Czech Republic (Peace With Seals by Miloslav Novak, and Lost Holiday by Lucie Králová) representing the new poetical form of expression of a generation of talented authors from a little-know country. Or like the extremely young Chinese filmmaker Weng Shou-ming (26), whose feature Fujian Blue describes human vices and follies of present-day China, without dwelling too much on them or making them spectacular. The age of red lanterns is over, now there is only neon light.

The Short Film Competition, instead, presents 48 works, that will be awarded by a delegation from the BFI - British Film Institute, one of the most prestigious film institutes in the world. A selection of works by young directors from little-known countries - high-quality films that belong to different genres and deal with different themes, but always represent the creativity of this new generation of authors.

Films from 23 countries (among them, Canada, Finland, Taiwan, Iceland, Argentina, and Lithuania); 13 women filmmakers, including a 20-year-old French girl (the youngest filmmaker selected); 8 filmmakers under the age of 25; the most diverse themes, formats, and genres (documentaries, a mockymentary, biographies, video art and video dance works, video clips, and animation films); a substantial presence of works from France and Britain (8 films respectively), as well as from Eastern Europe (Hungary, Poland, and the Slovak Republic); and very few Italian works (2 films only), even though most of the shorts submitted were Italian productions.